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The Poetic Edda. Essays on Old Norse Mythology. Edited by Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. xviii + 290 pp. Illus. £75.00 (hbk). ISBN 0-8153-1660-7
This volume provides an introductory survey of the last generation of scholarship on the corpus of eddic mythological poetry. The thirteen essays deal with the first eleven poems of the Codex Regius compilation of eddic poetry and three poems transmitted elsewhere (Baldrs draumar, Rigsfrula, and Hyndluljoo)-Grottasongr is excluded, curiously (p. xviii, note 20).
Nine of the essays (by Lars Lonnroth, Svava Jakobsdottir, Joseph Harris, Carol Clover, Preben Meulengracht S0rensen, Philip N. Anderson, Jerold C. Frakes, John McKinnell, and Thomas D. Hill) are reprints of work published between 1975 and 1990. Lonnroth's passage on Voluspa, from his book Den dubbla scenen: Muntlig diktning fran Eddan till ABBA (1978), and Svava Jakobsdottir's offering on the Gunnlgo-episode in Havamal are translated from Swedish and Icelandic, respectively. Harris appends a new but insubstantial afterword to his essay on the curse of the thistle in Skirnismal, the oldest article to make the collection. McKinnell's piece on Vclundarkvida is presented in abbreviated form, curtailing his argument for the poem's English origins. Four other essays (by Acker, Larrington, Margaret Clunies Ross, and Judy Quinn) "were written expressly for this volume" (p. xiv).
The poems are, with some exceptions, represented individually in single essays. Each piece is preceded by a brief editorial introduction for the non-specialist, describing the preservation and content of the poem(s) and providing an overview of recent criticism, plus...